Parent, Child, Parent

I don't remember exactly when I was orphaned. I know we are all orphaned at some point; recently for some of my friends it has been in the seventh decade of life. The first inkling for me came when I was three or four, standing in front of a picture window in an empty living room wishing someone would come home and take care of me. The second time was the summer I was thirteen, this time sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor crying as I listen to my mother call me a whore. In front of my aunt and uncle while my father stands silently by.

Thirteen year old girls are not easy but mothers of those not quite women can be brutal. The year preceding that summer, my eighth grade year, was especially difficult for both my mother and me. She was turning forty and finding herself back in the work force as a way to steady the income my father had always played fast and loose with. At the same time I stubbornly drew a line and refused to wear the little girl clothes she preferred to buy; twin versions my younger sister, by eight years, was also wearing. I drew the line and she left me out there in no man's land; none of the new income would flow my way for clothing or much else for that matter.

So I began babysitting to earn my own wardrobe, and the sewing I had played at since I was nine was put to use copying skirts other girls bought at the new mall in town. With a new sense of freedom those earnings gave me I took advantage of my mother's absence to range farther afield after school, and along with other girls my age developed an interest in boys. Playing basketball, baseball, meeting at the bowling alley and the occasional movie were new ways to pass the time when not in school. In the summer those activities were augmented by trips to the beach on the army bus provided expressly for that purpose. That bus became a source of independence and we used it to hang out; many fun filled hours were enjoyed as we rode back and forth to the army recreation center. Still in all I was not a bad child.

This particular Saturday I was playing baseball with a group of kids at a field near our house; it was mid morning and we had managed to corral a not too large group and field two teams. It was noteworthy because if there were enough boys the girls would be relegated to the sidelines to watch rather than join in the game. It was 1964 and women's lib was but a phrase in Life magazine; it had no place on the playgrounds of my youth. My Aunt Bobby and Uncle Andy were visiting from Illinois and while in years past I rarely left their side, things had changed over the winter and my uncle had embarrassed me by singing "Peggy Sue" the previous night at a little league game. So I escaped the house bright and early that day.

The game was just getting under way when my parents drove by with my aunt and uncle in tow; my father stopped the car and my mother ordered me home. I was not sure what I had done or why my brother was allowed to stay but I left and, embarrassed once again, returned home. It would be several hours before they came back but before I could say a word my mother tore into me; me and my "little whore friends" and our forays into the nearby woods was the subject of her diatribe. I fiercely defended myself and although in retrospect I know it sounded like sass I didn't care at that point. Horribly embarrassed the damage was done; never again would I derive any pleasure from those family visits. Never again would I feel the same need to please my mother.

As I sat there on that floor, where I am sure I landed partly out of my own drama, all I could think about was how I did not need these people; how I did not need anyone. I knew I was nothing like the people who were raising me and indeed would never, ever, aspire to be anything like them. And while I understood that I could not leave, there was no escaping the hold they had on me, I also knew in that instant that the only way out was education. And that I could, and indeed would, work four more years to get the grades I needed to go to college.

I am not sure how exact those thoughts were in my head at that moment, but the gestalt understanding of what it would take to survive the family, the parents, I had been born to was completely formed at that time. I was orphaned again in the kitchen of that house and it was my own doing.

Almost twenty-five years later when my mother died, followed shortly by my father, I was orphaned for the last time. I had become educated, married well and had two beautiful sons, but the desire to be someone's child never left me. I went away to school but came back time and again seeking a mother and a father. They were not there; not the way I needed them. The visits were short lived but always I came back trying to be the good daughter, giving them the opportunity to be the good parents.

I am not sure we ever stop needing to be someone's child. At some point, in order to achieve some real kind of maturity, we have to become the parent to our own little orphan. Luck was on my side the winter my mother died; it was the right time and place to learn to love the abused little girl I carried inside. It was not easy and it did not happen overnight but I know now that my parents were just orphans themselves, suffering from their own brokenness, and that they had neither the energy nor the skills to heal themselves.  They just passed that wounding on to their children. But what I also know is that the greatest gift they gave me was dying young. I do not grieve for those lost years.

The Christmas before my mother died in February we were once again standing in her kitchen and she was telling me about the chest pain from which she was suffering. She knew she needed a cardiac cath but she could not leave my father long enough, trust him enough, to go and have the procedure that would have saved her life. She died two months later of a massive heart attack. My father was drunk when I arrived for the funeral and except for the actual day she was buried he remained drunk until the day he died eighteen months later. It was his drunkenness that forced me to face my demons and enabled me to become the parent to my own child.

It was not easy and I am not sure it is ever finished, this work of raising yourself, but it becomes easier over time and the results are incredibly rewarding. However what I have come to understand is that while being a parent to my own child had to be learned, trying to parent my parents was a job I had assumed early without thought or preparation. So now, even as I find myself healed from those early parental wounds, I realize I am drawn to parent other orphan children. The mother in me cannot stop. And it is not the loving mother but the disapproving mother that often takes over. Because while I am compelled by the orphans staring out of the eyes of friends and lovers I am also frustrated and irritated with them for not being their own good parents.

Forgiveness is the underlying desire of this place I find myself. Forgiving my parents, forgiving myself, forgiving my friends and siblings and lovers. But also seeking the forgiveness of my children for being the imperfect parent I was and am. Because while I have come to understand that all parents are flawed it has been especially difficult for me to accept my own imperfections. I do think my sons and their wives are light years ahead of where I was at their ages, and certainly where my parents were at any age; they understand forgiveness in a way I have only just begun to appreciate. And I, their mother, find myself the beneficiary of that wisdom. Children and parents...the circle of life. Easy to embrace, challenging to hold.

Artist-in-Waiting?

It's too early for coffee; perhaps I will go back to sleep I think as I write. Perhaps.

I have been immersed in a renovation project, actually two projects, this year. I have not taken time to write or make art but I have worked steadily keeping my head down and until the last few days slept well. As this second project comes to a close I find myself unable to sleep. Or not able to sleep for long periods; the full nights sleep that has been a trademark of the last ten years eludes me.

My friend Rosie has come to visit for the month of August. She is renting the other little house just down the hill that we own here in the mountains. She came with hope and desire; a desire to spend time writing by herself and writing with me. I have not written since last December, and I was not sure that I would again until Rosie came.

In years past whenever I was having trouble sleeping it often felt as if God was calling me. I am so busy during the daylight hours I don't seem to hear that call and so it is the middle of the night that I get awakened with an image or a thought, or more than a thought; an essay. That is what happened tonight.

Rosie is retired from a life of dedicated work. She was a nurse, a teacher, a visionary in the medical community and finished her career as CEO of a retirement community. Rosie saw the need, found the resources and initiated the project in our hometown. It is a model program. Now she has retired, with a pension and her savings and moved back to Virginia. That  is why she is visiting for a month and not just a week or a weekend.

I am not retired. True I am sixty-three years old and have had various jobs from which I might have retired if I had dedicated my life to any one, or even two of them. What I do now, over the last ten or twelve years is just an extension of that job life, but not really a job. I am not sure what to call it or what it is.

Upon graduating from school in the early seventies I took and passed my boards to become a registered nurse. I dedicated myself to that work, first in the army then in teaching hospitals until I had my first child. Then I became a stay-at-home mom. Another child and four years later I became possessed of the itch to go back to school. Always a mom, a cub scout den mother, a PTA worker and elementary school art mother I began taking classes, succeeding in getting my BFA in studio art. Six years had elapsed. I still had no career but I was hired as an art teacher in the very school I had just volunteered hundreds of hours. An award of sorts.

Married, at the time, to an army officer there was no doubt that he had a career. A graduate of West Point and Rutger's Law School his work defined career in our family. Many of my shifts in jobs, and school, were precipitated by his reassignments. So just as I caught my breath and began to have a feel for teaching we moved to New York; where a BFA did not qualify me to teach art. After getting my children settled in a new home and a new school, and a couple of months of pondering my existence, I went back into nursing; a field I had left thirteen years earlier.

It was overwhelming at first but as I got back in the rhythm I remembered why I loved this work. More jobs would follow, some in nursing, some in the arts. At the same time I became truly immersed in painting, something I had not felt particularly called to when getting my degree. It was invigorating and inspiring to be me, a healer of sorts, a teacher and community activist. I felt at the top of my game.

At that point I decided to turn the non-profit I had conceived and given birth to over a period of ten years to a new director and retired to my home and studio to make serious art. Only it did not come. Sure we bought a new house and I, being enamored of the Bloomsbury Group, painted every room. Applying faux finishes and decorative murals throughout, the work was beyond invigorating. But my studio work lanquished.

I made my first mosaic in that house after a trip to Italy with women friends. Many more mosaics would follow. In the hope of saving my marriage there was a move to another house, this time with major renovations and redesign projects. The budget dictated saving the old kitchen cabinets so I designed the space around them, painting every surface; beautiful painting some of it. New rooms were added with skylights and large windows overlooking a wide deck and garden-in-waiting. I did finish the house but I could not save my marriage or finish that garden.

I bought a condo and invigorated by the previous project began another renovation. This time I did more of the work myself, ripping out carpet and scraping the cement slab until it was returned to a near virgin state, I stained and sealed it. I applied mosaics in the kitchen and bathroom. I hired painters for the walls. It was a little gem and when it sold two years later there was a nice profit to show for my labor.

Remarrying, this time to a judge albeit another lawyer, I moved into his newly re-imagined, renovated early twentieth century home. I kept my studio in a rundown warehouse of a building nearby and got busy with the business of marriage, again. A month later a tree fell on the old garage and we began the process of building it back, this time inspired by the idea of an arts and crafts era "gar-low", combination garage bungalow.

I drew up the plans and my husband and I, acting as our own contractors, began the paperwork necessary to rebuild in a historic district. The little shed garage grew into a six hundred square foot building with a studio above that now serves as our media center and overflow guest space. It was almost two years in the making, as well as another few months of landscaping and hardscaping, but finally we were done in the spring of 2008. The next summer we bought a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina.

That is where I sit now as I write this. Well not exactly in that cabin but in the slightly larger, newly renovated, bungalow up the hill. After completing the remaking of the little cabin three years ago we began feeling the urge to have something just slightly larger. With more bedrooms for little visitors. And a flat driveway. So here I sit.

It is a quarter to five in the morning and we are getting ready to host a family reunion in two weeks at the new house. Last week the painters finished the exterior while the masons completed the front entrance; today the contractor comes back to install the mantle on the new fireplace. Since April we have torn out windows and doors, moved and added walls, opened old doorways and restored rooms to their former function. I have painted, and re-painted, kitchen cabinets and walls, stained paneling and helped refinish floors. Imagining, and re-imagining, the front entrance I moved brick and stone trying to maintain the original concept while improving the function. Only then did we call the masons. Much of the work has been about function although aesthetic concerns were never secondary to the process.

Sitting here in the master bedroom there is the feeling of a nest. Unintentional but after all we are in the trees. Not much was changed in this room; new french doors that actually open to the deck and painted walls come to mind. There is a new seagrass rug on the floor under the bed and a new quilt on top of it. It is the most recent in a series of quilts I began making when our first grandchild was born seven years ago. Fabricated over the past winter while we were waiting to get started on this newest project, it is the first one made for myself, and I love being in this bed.

So what next is the question everyone has begun asking. Are you doing any art is the other. I always make excuses when that query comes along; new marriage, ten grandchildren in seven years, new houses. But now as I look back I see all I have been doing is my art. For the last fifteen years, since leaving the employ of the Art Factory and striking out on my own.

Everything I have done, every house constructed or renovated has been a work of art. In addition to conceiving the space and drawing the plans I have created mosaics and floorcloths and quilts to fill the homes. Some I have left behind. Some I have carried with me. Some are yet to be made. But the conception, the inspiration and the energy are all there, waiting.

So yes I am a working productive artist and no, I am not retired. Hopefully I never will be. But this time I have plans to finish the garden; after I paint the bathrooms.